Monday, March 03, 2014

Horizon Scanning – bears really do shit in the wood

Horizon Scanning is a popular
sport these days. Commission a report, by people who scan for the opinions of
others on the web and out pops a report that is invariably a statement of the
bleedin’ obvious. You too can read that the Pope is a Catholic and that bears do
indeed shit in the woods – social, mobile, MOOCs, cloud, 3D printing, wearables
– ho hum. How can we avoid this?

1. Focus on starting line

Let’s not start with a distant
technological horizon but change focus and first up, have a good, hard look
around and ask that age old question “To
what problems are these emerging technologies a solution?’ Flip the issue
and ask about the top ten learning problems to which technology is a solution.
This will lead, not to a predictable list, of what technologies just appear,
which any fourteen year old can tell you about, to a more relevant list of
technologies that could solve problems in learning.

2. Ask what inhibits learning?

How about the Top Ten
specific inhibitors to learning in, say, Higher Education? Take the lecture,
long-form essay, poor formative feedback, agricultural calendar, low occupancy
buildings, one intake per year, crisis of costs, crisis of relevance, poor
teaching, poor CPD….. these are just some of the commonly debated weaknesses in
the existing model. These should be our starting points, not treating
technologies like ballista balls being fired over the walls at academe.

3. Don’t see technology as disruptive i.e. dystopian

When you read between the
lines, these reports betray a view of technology as ‘disruptive’, which many in
education read as dystopian. Technological advances are seen as an annoying
nuisance that has to be ‘coped’ with, rather than just real progress in the
real world. The future is the ‘other’, to be feared rather than embraced and
welcomed. In truth, education barely uses the technology of today, never mind
the technology of tomorrow. Don’t horizon scan, start with what’s your students
currently have and do.

4. Abandon deep-rooted conceits

The reasons for this dystopian
bias lie in several deep-rooted conceits in education and training. These
conceits are, 1) teaching is always good and anything that threatens teaching
is bad, 2) teachers are special and that anything that threatens teachers is
bad, 3) teaching is a necessary condition for learning, and 4) face-to-face contact
is a necessary condition for learning. None of these are true but all are
deeply held, basic assumptions, if not prejudices, in education. We need to
face up to the hard fact that technology changes some of these assumptions.

5. Think of technologies that will NOT work

Really smart prophets are
those who know what technologies will NOT work in learning. I’m on the side of
people like Steve Rayson at Kineo who consistently derides those who see mobile
learning as some sort of inevitable pedagogic force. I’ve seen reports that
have gone gaga on, say 3D printing, yet when it comes down to matching this
with real learning, it all seems a little lame. Don’t just scan for everything
that appears, be highly selective.

6. Don’t set up a quango

Whenever ‘institutions’,
‘quangos’ or ‘ centres of excellence for technology’ are put in charge of
technology in learning, the whole business gets institutionalised and yet more
committees and reports get produced, with yet more dilution. The virtual world
of technology is not usually well served by physical buildings and
organisations.

7. Keep it simple

What’s needed, rather than
endless Horizon reports, are a few hard policy decisions around mandated,
online solutions, so that the system can ‘plan’. A good example is the just
announced 10% online in courses by 2015/16 rising to 50% online by 2017/18 in
the FELTAG report for Further Education. We could mandate minimum levels of
bandwidth in educational institutions. We could stop ‘banning’ and ‘blocking’
things. This is a hard-nosed catalyst or stimulus for action, something the
Principal and CFO of a college can work with and plan to. The technology will
fall into place if the planning is right.

Conclusion

It is this matching of
problems with solutions that can lead to good predictive policy, rather than
committees, chosen not on merit but on who knows who, in government – the usual
suspects, some very suspicious indeed. Think in terms of solutions to problems
and stop the endless stream of Horizon reports with endless streams of isolated
recommendations that remain isolated and fragmented. It’s all about decision-making and action.